Power-efficient approaches to reliability

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Publication Type Journal Article
School or College College of Engineering
Department Computing, School of
Creator Balasubramonian, Rajeev
Other Author Madan, Niti
Title Power-efficient approaches to reliability
Date 2005
Description Radiation-induced soft errors (transient faults) in computer systems have increased significantly over the last few years and are expected to increase even more as we move towards smaller transistor sizes and lower supply voltages. Fault detection and recovery can be achieved through redundancy. State-of-the-art implementations execute two copies of the same program as two threads, either on the same or on separate processor cores, and periodically check results. While this solution has favorable performance and reliability properties, every redundant instruction flows through a high-frequency complex out-of-order pipeline, thereby incurring a high power consumption penalty. This paper proposes mechanisms that attempt to provide reliability at a modest complexity cost. When executing a redundant thread, the trailing thread benefits from the information produced by the leading thread. We take advantage of this property and comprehensively study different strategies to reduce the power overhead of the trailing core. These strategies include dynamic frequency scaling, in-order execution, and parallelization of the trailing thread.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
First Page 1
Last Page 26
Subject Radiation-induced; Soft errors; Transient faults; Redundant thread; Trailing thread; Power consumption
Subject LCSH Redundancy (Engineering)
Language eng
Bibliographic Citation Madan, N., & Balasubramonian, R. (2005). Power-efficient approaches to reliability. Technical Report UUCS-05-010, 1-26, December.
Series University of Utah Computer Science Technical Report
Relation is Part of ARPANET
Rights Management (c)University of Utah
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 166,445 bytes
Identifier ir-main,12017
ARK ark:/87278/s6qj81cx
Setname ir_uspace
ID 702613
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6qj81cx
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